Uneasy Money.
by P. G. Wodehouse.
1
In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue-a large young man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown, clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanity that flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore a serious, almost a wistful expression. He was frowning slightly. One would have said that here was a man with a secret sorrow.
William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, had no secret sorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the best method of laying a golf ball dead in front of the Palace Theatre. It was his habit to pa.s.s the time in mental golf when Claire Fenwick was late in keeping her appointments with him. On one occasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able to do nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up near Hammersmith. His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself with simple things.
As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings, b.u.t.tonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anch.o.r.ed himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all starving.
This sort of thing was always happening to Lord Dawlish. There was something about him, some atmosphere of unaffected kindliness, that invited it.
In these days when everything, from the shape of a man"s hat to his method of dealing with asparagus, is supposed to be an index to character, it is possible to form some estimate of Lord Dawlish from the fact that his vigil in front of the Bandolero had been expensive even before the advent of the Benedict with the studs and laces. In London, as in New York, there are spots where it is unsafe for a man of yielding disposition to stand still, and the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus is one of them. Scrubby, impecunious men drift to and fro there, waiting for the G.o.ds to provide something easy; and the prudent man, conscious of the possession of loose change, whizzes through the danger zone at his best speed, "like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread." In the seven minutes he had been waiting two frightful fiends closed in on Lord Dawlish, requesting loans of five shillings till Wednesday week and Sat.u.r.day week respectively, and he had parted with the money without a murmur.
A further clue to his character is supplied by the fact that both these needy persons seemed to know him intimately, and that each called him Bill. All Lord Dawlish"s friends called him Bill, and he had a catholic list of them, ranging from men whose names were in "Debrett" to men whose names were on the notice boards of obscure clubs in connexion with the non-payment of dues. He was the sort of man one instinctively calls Bill.
The anti-race-suicide enthusiast with the rubber rings did not call Lord Dawlish Bill, but otherwise his manner was intimate. His lordship"s gaze being a little slow in returning from the middle distance-for it was not a matter to be decided carelessly and without thought, this problem of carrying the length of Shaftesbury Avenue with a single bra.s.sy shot-he repeated the gossip from the home. Lord Dawlish regarded him thoughtfully.
"It could be done," he said, "but you"d want a bit of pull on it.
I"m sorry; I didn"t catch what you said."
The other obliged with his remark for the third time, with increased pathos, for constant repet.i.tion was making him almost believe it himself.
"Four starving children?"
"Four, guv"nor, so help me!"
"I suppose you don"t get much time for golf then, what?" said Lord Dawlish, sympathetically.
It was precisely three days, said the man, mournfully inflating a dying rooster, since his offspring had tasted bread.
This did not touch Lord Dawlish deeply. He was not very fond of bread. But it seemed to be troubling the poor fellow with the studs a great deal, so, realizing that tastes differ and that there is no accounting for them, he looked at him commiseratingly.
"Of course, if they like bread, that makes it rather rotten, doesn"t it? What are you going to do about it?"
"Buy a dying rooster, guv"nor," he advised. "Causes great fun and laughter."
Lord Dawlish eyed the strange fowl without enthusiasm.
"No," he said, with a slight shudder.
There was a pause. The situation had the appearance of being at a deadlock.
"I"ll tell you what," said Lord Dawlish, with the air of one who, having pondered, has been rewarded with a great idea: "the fact is, I really don"t want to buy anything. You seem by bad luck to be stocked up with just the sort of things I wouldn"t be seen dead in a ditch with. I can"t stand rubber rings, never could. I"m not really keen on b.u.t.tonhooks. And I don"t want to hurt your feelings, but I think that squeaking bird of yours is about the beastliest thing I ever met. So suppose I give you a shilling and call it square, what?"
"Gawd bless yer, guv"nor."
"Not at all. You"ll be able to get those children of yours some bread-I expect you can get a lot of bread for a shilling. Do they really like it? Rum kids!"
And having concluded this delicate financial deal Lord Dawlish turned, the movement bringing him face to face with a tall girl in white.
During the business talk which had just come to an end this girl had been making her way up the side street which forms a short cut between Coventry Street and the Bandolero, and several admirers of feminine beauty who happened to be using the same route had almost dislocated their necks looking after her. She was a strikingly handsome girl. She was tall and willowy. Her eyes, shaded by her hat, were large and grey. Her nose was small and straight, her mouth, though somewhat hard, admirably shaped, and she carried herself magnificently. One cannot blame the policeman on duty in Leicester Square for remarking to a cabman as she pa.s.sed that he envied the bloke that that was going to meet.
Bill Dawlish was this fortunate bloke, but, from the look of him as he caught sight of her, one would have said that he did not appreciate his luck. The fact of the matter was that he had only just finished giving the father of the family his shilling, and he was afraid that Claire had seen him doing it. For Claire, dear girl, was apt to be unreasonable about these little generosities of his. He cast a furtive glance behind him in the hope that the disseminator of expiring roosters had vanished, but the man was still at his elbow. Worse, he faced them, and in a hoa.r.s.e but carrying voice he was instructing Heaven to bless his benefactor.
"Halloa, Claire darling!" said Lord Dawlish, with a sort of sheepish breeziness. "Here you are."
Claire was looking after the stud merchant, as, grasping his wealth, he scuttled up the avenue.
"Only a bob," his lordship hastened to say. "Rather a sad case, don"t you know. Squads of children at home demanding bread. Didn"t want much else, apparently, but were frightfully keen on bread."
"He has just gone into a public-house."
"He may have gone to telephone or something, what?"
"I wish," said Claire, fretfully, leading the way down the grillroom stairs, "that you wouldn"t let all London sponge on you like this. I keep telling you not to. I should have thought that if any one needed to keep what little money he has got it was you."
Certainly Lord Dawlish would have been more prudent not to have parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man. Indeed, with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose finances were so irregular that he could not be said to possess an income at all, he was the poorest man of his rank in the British Isles.
It was in the days of the Regency that the Dawlish coffers first began to show signs of cracking under the strain, in the era of the then celebrated Beau Dawlish. Nor were his successors backward in the spending art. A breezy disregard for the preservation of the pence was a family trait. Bill was at Cambridge when his predecessor in the t.i.tle, his Uncle Philip, was performing the concluding exercises of the dissipation of the Dawlish doubloons, a feat which he achieved so neatly that when he died there was just enough cash to pay the doctors, and no more. Bill found himself the possessor of that most ironical thing, a moneyless t.i.tle. He was then twenty-three.
Until six months before, when he had become engaged to Claire Fenwick, he had found nothing to quarrel with in his lot. He was not the type to waste time in vain regrets. His tastes were simple. As long as he could afford to belong to one or two golf clubs and have something over for those small loans which, in certain of the numerous circles in which he moved, were the inevitable concomitant of popularity, he was satisfied. And this modest ambition had been realized for him by a group of what he was accustomed to refer to as decent old bucks, who had installed him as secretary of that aristocratic and exclusive club, Brown"s in St James Street, at an annual salary of four hundred pounds. With that wealth, added to free lodging at one of the best clubs in London, perfect health, a steadily-diminishing golf handicap, and a host of friends in every walk of life, Bill had felt that it would be absurd not to be happy and contented.
But Claire had made a difference. There was no question of that. In the first place, she resolutely declined to marry him on four hundred pounds a year. She scoffed at four hundred pounds a year. To hear her talk, you would have supposed that she had been brought up from the cradle to look on four hundred pounds a year as small change to be disposed of in tips and cab fares. That in itself would have been enough to sow doubts in Bill"s mind as to whether he had really got all the money that a reasonable man needed; and Claire saw to it that these doubts sprouted, by confining her conversation on the occasions of their meeting almost entirely to the great theme of money, with its minor sub-divisions of How to get it, Why don"t you get it? and I"m sick and tired of not having it.
She developed this theme to-day, not only on the stairs leading to the grillroom, but even after they had seated themselves at their table. It was a relief to Bill when the arrival of the waiter with food caused a break in the conversation and enabled him adroitly to change the subject.
"What have you been doing this morning?" he asked.
"I went to see Maginnis at the theatre."
"Oh!"
"I had a wire from him asking me to call. They want me to call. They want me to take up Claudia Winslow"s part in the number one company."
"That"s good."
"Why?"
"Well-er-what I mean-well, isn"t it? What I mean is, leading part, and so forth."
"In a touring company?"
"Yes, I see what you mean," said Lord Dawlish, who didn"t at all. He thought rather highly of the number one companies that hailed from the theatre of which Mr Maginnis was proprietor.
"And anyhow, I ought to have had the part in the first place instead of when the tour"s half over. They are at Southampton this week. He wants me to join them there and go on to Portsmouth with them."
"You"ll like Portsmouth."
"Why?"